Course materials, for example, documents and other information resources that instructors make available to students, are traditionally kept in binders on a “reserve shelf” of a library. Typical reserve materials consist of copies of previous exams, articles from scientific and trade journals, homework solutions, excerpts from books, and the like. Generally, there is only one copy of a document placed on reserve. Furthermore, such document is traditionally available only for in-library use, on a short-term loan basis.
An emerging solution to the limitations presented in traditional reserve mechanisms involve placing reserve materials on electronic reserve. In fact, with the growth of the Internet, electronic document delivery and storage now extends far beyond course reserves to make all types of documents available electronically. A significant fraction of the documents added to electronic databases, however, exist in an ink-on-paper format. Those who administer such systems, for example, librarians, college faculty, and school teachers, are thus faced with the task of first converting these paper copies to electronic formats, and then transferring the computer file(s) to an Internet server used to house an electronic documents database.
The current two-step process for placing printed materials on electronic reserve is unsatisfactory for many users in that the process may be time-consuming and potentially confusing to an average (non-technical) teacher, librarian, or administrator. Both the scanning and the file transfer steps require some, if not considerable, technical expertise. Even someone skilled in the use of a scanner may sometimes struggle to create output files that are both of manageable size and of high display quality. Many times, post-scanning image processing may be necessary to either reduce the size of the output files and/or make them more legible. Such post-scanning image processing is time consuming and also requires some technical knowledge.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for automating the placement of documents into an electronic reserves system. Such a system and method should preferably cater to the needs of people with little or no technical expertise to facilitate the electronic placement of such documents.